Gabriel Regus’s father was a sharp dresser, a man of the community, and a dentist in Washington Heights. In the New York of the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood was absorbing thousands of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans making a new home in a new country, and the elder Regus built his practice from the ground up inside it.
“The energy was incredible,” Regus says.
What his son remembers most, though, is what happened when a patient couldn’t pay. There was no version of that story in which the patient was shown the door. His father found another way—free care, credit extended on little more than a handshake, sometimes a straight barter with a neighbor. For a boy watching from the front row, it amounted to an early and unusually practical education: tools exist to solve human problems, and a professional’s skill is never entirely his own.
“One phrase my father would say was, ‘We made a commitment to our community and country to never stop building,’” Regus says. “I didn’t fully understand that as a child, but I understand it now.”
Four decades later, Regus is applying that sentence to the American electric grid.
He is senior grid technology development manager at Puget Sound Energy, the Washington utility serving more than 1.9 million customers, where his job is to determine which emerging technologies deserve a place on a system that cannot afford to fail. He is also the founder of Hispanics in Tech, a nonprofit built to increase Hispanic representation and leadership across the technology sector. On a résumé, the two roles look unrelated. Regus describes them as the same work.
The timing is not incidental. After nearly two decades of flat consumption, electricity demand in the United States is climbing again. Utilities are simultaneously modernizing the grid, absorbing distributed energy resources, hardening against wildfire, supporting the electrification of transportation and buildings, and fielding the load that AI infrastructure brings with it—all under genuine affordability pressure. Every one of those forces eventually arrives at someone’s desk as a decision about what to buy, build, or bet on.
“As utilities face rising demand, grid modernization, wildfire risk, electrification, AI, distributed energy resources, and affordability pressure, they need better systems for deciding which technologies to pursue, how to evaluate them, and how to scale what works,” Regus says.
At Puget Sound Energy, Regus oversees the pilot-to-production process—the pipeline that carries an idea from first conversation through evaluation and field trial and, if it survives, into daily operations. He describes the role as something close to an internal innovation consultant, with a portfolio spanning grid modernization, distributed energy resources, reliability, wildfire risk mitigation, and data platforms.
“We’re talking about technology that could provide situational awareness for wildfires or increase reliability for our customers,” he says. “It runs such a wide range, and it’s such an incredible opportunity to highlight that innovation exists here.”
That range is the point, and it is also what makes utility innovation its own discipline—distinct from the startup version most people picture when they hear the word.
“Innovation inside a utility is different because we have immediate access to the real problems facing the grid,” Regus says. “The challenge in utility innovation isn’t simply imagining new ideas.”
Ideas, he points out, have gotten cheap.
“Ideas are easy in the age of AI,” he says. “The next era of utility innovation will require more than pilots and PowerPoints. It will require structured intelligence, better decision-making, cross-functional alignment, and systems that help utilities turn emerging technology into measurable outcomes.”
It is a sharper claim than it first sounds. Utilities are not short on innovation; they are short on the connective tissue between innovation and operations—the intake process, the evaluation criteria, the honest business case, the handoff from the team that ran the pilot to the team that has to live with the result at two in the morning. Pilots are comparatively easy to start and remarkably easy to strand. Regus has built a career at the seam where they get stranded.
The Habit of Building It Yourself
Just before the COVID-19 lockdown, Regus decided he wanted to understand software from the inside rather than manage it from a distance. He sought out a software development course at Columbia University and got to work building applications—a mid-career utility manager learning the ins and outs of a second profession, largely because the first one kept surfacing problems that code could solve.
It is a revealing move. Confronted with a gap, Regus’s instinct is not to write a memo about the gap.
That instinct is also what produced the nonprofit. While he was learning to build software, he kept noticing who else was in the room—and who wasn’t.
“I was disappointed at the lack of Hispanics I saw in tech,” he says. “It made me think about my values and where I came from. I’ve gone to conferences and meetings at large technology companies, and similar organizations, the last few years, and it just reinforced that people like me didn’t inherit pathways for how to establish a career in tech. The infrastructure in our communities is just a little bit different, and it made me committed to lifting up that next generation.”
The operative word is inherit. Regus’s diagnosis of the pipeline problem begins well before anyone’s first interview, and it is not a diagnosis about ambition. Educators in Hispanic communities, he says, frequently aren’t equipped with the tools, exposure, or pathways to point a promising student toward a technology career. The talent was never the constraint. The map was.
Hispanics in Tech was built to shorten that distance, and most of its programming is free by design. Its center of gravity is students and early-career professionals, though Regus is just as interested in pulling executives and entrepreneurs onto the platform to voice what the community actually needs. He would rather it not be read as a networking group.
“Most of our programs are free because access matters,” he says. “Over the next few years, success for Hispanics in Tech means expanding technical literacy across fields like AI, fintech, energy tech, and other emerging industries.”
What Translates
Ask Regus what connects a dental practice, an engineering career, a coding course, a utility innovation portfolio, and a nonprofit, and he lands on a single word: translation.
“My superpower is that I can translate between worlds: engineering, software, operations, vendors, customers, communities, and emerging technology,” he says. “I understand both the technical side of innovation and the human side of change.”
That capacity has a source, and Regus does not locate it in a classroom.
“While all of those experiences are important, I still consider my Hispanic background pivotal in helping me navigate the innovation space,” he says. “It makes you see challenges in a different light, and it makes you want to roll up your sleeves and make things happen yourself.”
The Washington Heights lesson turned out to be portable. Whether he is working with a vendor, an internal stakeholder, or the communities his utility serves, Regus tries to get into someone else’s shoes before he tries to fix anything—the same move his father made across a dental chair. He has often been one of the only Hispanic professionals in the room, a position that has occasionally made him feel like an ambassador for a different corner of American life. He would rather that be read as an asset than an anomaly, given the cultural intelligence, customer empathy, and lived experience he says Hispanic professionals carry into an organization.
“My leadership style is rooted in empathy, practicality, and meeting people where they are,” he says. “I believe trust is built by listening first, understanding the real constraint, and then helping people move toward a solution.”
Meeting people where they are is a leadership philosophy. It is also, in his hands, a design philosophy. Enterprise software fails most often not because the technology is wrong, but because it ignores how people actually work.
An Outstanding Commitment
Which is why Regus is increasingly unwilling to solve the problem one utility at a time. The distance between a promising technology and real operational value, he argues, is not a Puget Sound Energy problem or a Washington problem. It is structural, it is industry-wide, and it is the sort of thing that gets fixed by building something rather than by convening another working group. So he is doing what he has done at every previous juncture—learning the domain, then building the tool.
“This is a unique time to be in the energy industry because demand is increasing, the grid is evolving, and utilities need creative solutions to meet the moment,” he says. “I have some ideas about how we can make things easier for people in the energy sector, which will, in turn, make life better for our customers. I think tech can be part of the solution, but I live by the code that technology is only valuable when it improves lives.”
For the next generation he is trying to reach, his advice is unglamorous and specific: a foundation in the hard sciences, combined with even a light coding background, opens a startling number of doors.
“The energy industry is changing, and Hispanic professionals should know there are real opportunities in utilities, infrastructure, climate tech, and energy innovation,” Regus says.
His father built a practice a neighborhood could lean on. Regus is working on infrastructure of a different kind—power grids, pipelines of talent, and systems for deciding what is worth building in the first place. The commitment his father named, to the community and to the country and to never stop building, was made in a dental office in Washington Heights. As far as his son is concerned, it is still outstanding.
